This Old Temple: Love Can Do All But Raise Dead
by ardavenport
Summary: Having vanquished the emperor, Luke Skywalker is handed the biggest fixer-upper in the galaxy. And the ghosts inside.


**This Old Temple: Love Can Do All But Raise the Dead**

by ardavenport

* * *

It was a beautiful day, with a few picturesque clouds in a bright blue sky.

It seemed to Luke Skywalker that everyone else on Coruscant thought so, too, and were out to enjoy it. The overhead traffic seemed heavier than usual. On all four sides, streams of it penned in the great gray bunker that loomed behind him, a square boundary of traffic. Apparently neither the rise nor the collapse of the Empire affected the traffic on Coruscant.

Luke turned around and looked up at the Jedi Temple. His first impression remained the same. It looked like a Hutt fortress, a huge, imposing ziggurat rising over the gray-metal plain of the city.

He stood at the main entrance at the top of a flight of stairs at the head of a long processional way. Four huge statues of Jedi Knights faced outward toward the city on either side of him. Luke had no idea who they were, or why they merited statues, but presumably they were very important. Knowledge of the Jedi had been ruthlessly suppressed by the Empire. The New Republic had pledged to recover what they could, but Luke could see it was a much lower priority item than forming the new government, making alliances, reorganizing the Fleet under Alliance command, confronting rogue Imperial governors determined to stay in power, little things like that.

In the meantime, Luke's declared (and now real) status as a Jedi Knight had landed on him with a multi-billion ton inheritance, a gray, five-spired colossus that squatted on the skyline of the New Republic's capital planet.

The columned grand entrance, now choked with duracrete blocks, had been ordered sealed by Palpatine after the so-called 'Jedi Rebellion' and his reign was secure. On the roof and on the towers durasteel plates covered any exits, others had been welded shut, faded gray squares and outlines on blackened and burned surfaces. Nothing had been done with the Temple in years. Supposedly, Palpatine had some plans for it, but he had never gotten around to them. Being supreme ruler over many, many thousands of systems, crushing all political dissent and building two planet-destroying _Death Star_s was a full time job.

Luke looked down over the noisy deconstruction of the stormtrooper barracks and spaceship docks all around the base of the Temple, part of the demilitarization of Coruscant. Most of it had been built for the Clone Wars by the Jedi themselves. Once the Jedi were eliminated, the clones had simply remained and settled.

Now, they were leaving, pushed out by a civilian populace that never, ever wanted to see another armored clone in their midst again. The new government had complied with numerous restrictions on cloning and a termination on all trooper production. This generation of clone troopers would be the last as they served whatever useful assignment the government could find for them as far away from the Core worlds as possible.

The clones didn't care. They efficiently dismantled their outposts and bases all over the planet, obedient as they had been designed to be. But it would still take some time to remove everything from the districts around the Jedi Temple. And then. . . . ?

Luke turned back to his 'inheritance'. He walked forward, crossing the distance over the light gray duracrete into the shade under the columned entrance. Putting his hand on one enormous block, he cleared his mind. Not trying to probe, he just stood there, letting the feelings come.

It felt. . . . peaceful, like stone cooling in the evening after a hot day, the heat exhaling into the air around it. The turmoil of the Sith was gone. The Force was strong under his feet and all around him and. . . . quiet.

_Nothing for you here._

Luke's eyes snapped open. He took his hand away and backed up warily. All his senses alert, he waited, turned his head and looked up. But there was only the silent block face before him.

He sat down on the duracrete, cool in the shadows, and folded his legs cross-legged. A single black-clad figure dwarfed by the enormous columns, he closed his eyes, his mind clearing again so there was only his own barely stirring essence and the Force. And another presence.

A blue, hazy figure coalesced amidst the Force-outlines of the building, visible in the mind even without the eyes. Luke opened his eyes. The image of Anakin Skywalker 'stood' before him, a mental interpretation of the presence he felt.

"Was that you?" Luke asked out loud.

The presence of Anakin looked embarrassed. Luke frowned. He had not seen or felt the presences of his father, Yoda or Ben since the Alliance victory on Endor, nor had he seriously considered seeking them out since then. Until now.

"Fine." Luke climbed to his feet. "And you're wrong," he pointed out. "There's something here."

"The past," Anakin said, his voice a sigh.

"Like you?" Luke asked.

That made Anakin smile. "Maybe not quite like me. But could you really stay here?" he asked.

Luke shook his head. He had known after only a few days that he could never live his life on a city-planet like Coruscant. But now his father's question brought out the realization that if he did not, he took what would become of the Jedi with him. "I'm not staying. But I need to look. At the past." Yoda had given him the basic history of the Jedi Order, spoken between rigorous and exhausting physical and mental training on Dagobah. Luke knew that the Jedi had not always been on Coruscant. There were other worlds.

His father seemed to accept that.

"I can show you. When you get it open." The massive blockage loomed over both of them. "What I did."

Luke sighed. He could sense it, the edges of a terrible past. He knew about the thousands that Vader had killed, the deaths that he had presided over, the destruction of lives and homes during Palpatine's reign. With cold, righteous fury he had once vowed with his comrades in the Alliance to destroy the evil Empire. Before he had found out who Vader was. And what real rage could do.

Now Luke stood at the doorstep of where it had started.

Anakin was sad. "You don't know," he warned.

"No," Luke agreed. "I don't. But I guess I'm going to find out." It would take time, to just clear entrances of the Temple. Luke was there just to assess the structure for what he would need to start. But now, with his father's presence near, he sensed a deeper, more personal beginning.

"What happened to my mother?" he asked in the still air.

For a moment, he felt as if he were totally alone, under the shadow of the Temple, even though his father's image remained before him.

"I broke her heart," came the answer. "She begged me to stop. To turn away from the dark side. Even after she knew what I'd done. After what I'd become." Luke felt his father's scrutiny on him. "But I wanted power. I thought it could solve everything. Do anything. But when I thought she had betrayed me, plotted with Obi-Wan to destroy me, I turned it on her. I. . . . squeezed, crushed something inside her." Anakin's narrative turned inward toward himself. "She wasn't hurt, but she couldn't live after that. Just then, I was more powerful than the Emperor. And I used it to destroy the only person left who loved me." Anakin's attention returned to Luke. "She only lived long enough to give birth to you. And your sister."

Luke had suspected. Of all the terrible things that Vader had done, this could easily have been one of them. And so it was. But there was one other thing he needed to ask.

"Is she. . . . there?"

Yoda had told Luke that no other Jedi had ever achieved a state after death, such as Obi-Wan and the Master he had apprenticed under, that this was something new in the Force. But his father was there, so why not her, too?

"No," the answer came back, a long, lonely echo of loss. "She's gone. Like all the others." Luke knew that Anakin spoke of the purged Jedi, killed within the Temple walls nearby. "Just memories, feelings, part of the Force, but. . . . not her. He love wasn't enough for that."

Luke bowed his head. The answer felt right, just as he had known the truth when Vader had first told him who he was. He would never know his mother, only know about her through the small impressions and fragments he had grasped, that Leia had known without even realizing that they came through the Force and not just memory. Luke turned his back on his father's ghostly image to look over the vast plain of Coruscant, clusters of tall towers rising in the distance.

"I once thought that my power could save her. Could keep her from ever dying," his father continued sadly.

"You're here," Luke pointed out. "It must have done something." There was no blame in his voice; he felt none. And his father knew that.

"No," he answered. "This is the new balance to the Force, but it's not about power. It never was." Anakin's image moved forward, now a transparent blue apparition in Jedi robes on Luke's left. "It took too long for me to see that. But you do. Now, at the beginning. You don't need the past to know that."

"I guess not," Luke agreed. Then he turned back to the looming gray mountain behind him. "But I still have to do something about this."

Anakin's displeasure rippled in the air. Luke grinned, because he also sensed his father's acceptance. "I need to know what's there. I need to know what the Jedi were, if I'm supposed to figure out what they're going to be," he continued earnestly, facing the image of Anakin again. "Now, if you can help me, that's great. But I'm going to look anyway."

Luke got a smile in return. "I'll always be here," Anakin replied, his words and presence fading away into the air.

Luke grimaced. "Hey! What kind of 'always' is that?!" he yelled. He thought he heard a snicker in the breeze, but nothing else. His father was gone for now.

Tooo-Eeep-Ee-Rrrp-Ooop.

R2D2 rolled toward him, a question in his signals. Luke had set the droid off to scan the outer walls of Temple.

"I'm OK," he answered. "Did you get the specs we needed?"

Eee-Ooop!

"Good." He patted the droid's blue and silver dome. "I guess we better get back."

They went together back to the speeder. R2 hopped up, with a quick burst of his jets, to the rear cargo space, but Luke turned back, looking up at the Jedi Temple's high thick walls, the spires rising high above those.

It wasn't quite as big as the _Death Star_ but the depth of this problem was incomparably more vast. At least with a _Death Star_ all he had to worry about was blowing it up. But just looking inside the Jedi Temple would be a huge task that would consume all his time and energy. Then things would get much worse, after he saw what was there. He would need his father's help, and Yoda's, and Ben's and anyone else he could get.

Luke slid into the driver's seat and engaged the engine. His speeder lifted up and the joined the crowded lines of traffic above.

**- - - END**

(This story was first posted on tf.n: 22-April-2007)

**Disclaimer:** All characters and situations belong to George and Lucasfilm; I'm just playing in their sandbox.


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